Picture this: your Catholic employer congratulates your upcoming church wedding, advances part of your bonus to help with the mortgage, then fires you a month after you say "I do."
Wait, what?
That is exactly what happened inside the Institute for the Works of Religion, better known as the Vatican Bank, after a 2024 policy banned workplace marriages. Silvia Carlucci and Domenico Fabiani faced an impossible choice: keep the sacrament or keep the salary.
Beyond the viral oddity, the story exposes something more troubling—how a religious institution that preaches family as sacred built workplace rules treating family life as a threat to be neutralized.
This is not just about one couple. It is about what happens when institutional self-protection overruns the values institutions claim to defend.
The Rule That Asked Newlyweds To Choose
On May 2, 2024, the Vatican Bank rolled out a new personnel policy with one stark clause: if two IOR employees marry, or if an IOR employee marries anyone working in Vatican City State, their contracts terminate within 30 days unless one spouse resigns.
No nuance. No case-by-case review. Marriage itself becomes a firing offense.
For Carlucci and Fabiani, long-serving employees who had followed church procedure to obtain decrees of nullity from previous marriages, the shift was surreal. Three months before the policy, they informed management of their wedding plans. They were congratulated. Carlucci received an advance on her annual bonus to secure their mortgage. Their engagement was public in their parishes and at Rome city hall.
Everything aligned with what the Church says it wants: a regularized, sacramental marriage, stability for a blended family, financial responsibility.
Then came the reversal. They married on August 31, 2024. On October 1, after refusing the "one of you must quit" ultimatum, both were dismissed. Because they worked for the Vatican, they also lost access to Italian unemployment benefits.
The official rationale? Preventing conflicts of interest, favoritism, and reputational risk. Familiar corporate language. In practice, it landed like an institution telling two faithful adults: love is beautiful, but only off the clock.
Following The Money: IOR's Rationale Meets Reality
The Vatican Bank framed the ban as aligning with banking best practices: no "familism," no nepotism, no perception that sensitive financial operations are run by a family bloc.
Context matters. The IOR has spent years cleaning up after scandals, tightening controls, proving to the world it is a serious, transparent financial institution. A tough internal rule fits that storyline.
But look closer.
The policy took effect only after the last of five existing married employee couples retired. For staff, that timing felt less like abstract prudence and more like targeted control. A rule "in the works for some time" suddenly materializes once the only people it would immediately affect are a known, engaged couple.
In global banking, restrictions on relatives in sensitive roles exist, but they are typically specific: disclosures, separation of duties, recusal from supervision. Blanket bans on marrying a colleague, enforced with automatic dismissal, are not standard practice.
So why does a Catholic institution choose the harshest version?
To answer that, you have to step outside compliance language and into what the Church itself teaches.
When Doctrine Meets HR Policy
Catholic social teaching has spent more than a century insisting that work and family are not opposing teams.
Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum defended workers' rights and the family as the basic cell of society. Pope John Paul II's 1981 Laborem Exercens spoke of work serving the person, not consuming their dignity. Pope Francis has built a pro-family record inside the Vatican: daycare for employees, family allowances, constant public praise of marriage.
None of that sounds like "marry the wrong coworker and you are both disposable."
Carlucci and Fabiani, along with advocates from the Association of Lay Vatican Employees and the Catholic-inspired Acli union, leaned into that contradiction. They argued an internal HR rule cannot claim moral high ground while trampling the goods the Church calls sacred: free choice of spouse, protection of family life, the dignity of work.
Their question cuts to the heart of it: If canon law and papal teaching say one thing about marriage and workers, and a bank regulation says another, which reveals what the institution really values?
To find out, the couple did something quietly radical. They took the Vatican to its own court.
The Lawsuit That Forced A Look In The Mirror
After their October 1, 2024 dismissal, Carlucci and Fabiani were not just out of work. They were supporting three children between them, former spouses, and a new mortgage—without access to unemployment benefits because of the Vatican's jurisdiction.
They refused to treat their marriage as a mistake to be "fixed" by resignation.
In January 2025, they filed a wrongful termination case before the Vatican City State tribunal. Their claim was direct: the policy was applied retroactively, violated basic human rights and Vatican law, contradicted Catholic teaching on family life. They also accused the IOR of "mobbing"—workplace harassment through suspensions and salary cuts.
Judge Venerando Marano, presiding over the January hearing, urged both sides to consider settlement. Outside the courtroom, the ADLV and Acli amplified the case, arguing that internal regulations cannot override higher legal and moral principles.
In a tiny state with no independent labor courts and limited worker protections, this was more than an employment dispute. It exposed how, when the employer, lawmaker, and moral authority are the same entity, challenging an unjust rule requires rare courage.
And still, people inside the system spoke up.
Vatican Labor Rules: A System Built For Control
To understand how a workplace marriage ban got this far, it helps to remember where we are.
Vatican employment runs under its Fundamental Law, updated in 2000 and effective in 2001—a hybrid of canon law and civil administration. There are advocacy groups, but no fully independent trade unions inside the walls. The employer writes the rules, interprets them, and hosts the court that judges them.
Historically, married couples worked across Vatican departments without being treated as security threats. The IOR ban is not a long-standing tradition. It is an outlier, arriving in an era marked by financial austerity, hiring freezes, reduced benefits, and growing quiet frustration among staff.
In that setting, a blanket marriage ban reads like part of a wider reflex: when resources tighten and scrutiny grows, control hardens. Risks are managed not only through better systems, but through tighter leashes on human lives.
The Carlucci-Fabiani case did not create that tension. It made it visible.
Settlement Without Reform: What The Rehiring Really Says
In late 2025, a compromise arrived.
Both Carlucci and Fabiani were rehired within the Holy See's structures—one returned to the Vatican Bank, the other assigned to a different Vatican institution. Acli welcomed the outcome as a "victory of common sense."
Common sense, yes. But selective.
The underlying policy remained formally in place. The system bent just enough to defuse a public, painful case without admitting the rule itself was wrong.
For other employees, the message is mixed: speak up and, maybe, justice-by-exception is possible. But the structural imbalance—the ability to regulate intimate life in the name of institutional purity—still sits on the books.
Which raises the question this story presses on all of us: when institutions correct individual outcomes but keep the power structures that produced them, what have they really learned?
Looking Past The "Weird" To What Matters
At first glance, this is a "can you believe this?" headline about the Vatican firing people for marrying in church. Stay at that level, and it is just another oddity to scroll past.
Look closer, and it becomes a mirror.
A Church that champions marriage, family, and the dignity of workers allowed one of its own institutions to treat a lawful, sacramental marriage as a liability. A bank invoked the language of integrity to enforce a rule contradicting the spirit of the faith it serves.
The hopeful part is that a couple refused to choose between love and security, unions and colleagues broke the silence, and enough pressure built to force at least a partial course correction.
The couple's resilience matters because it charts a path: institutions that claim higher values can be held to them. Silvia Carlucci and Domenico Fabiani did not accept a false choice between following their faith and keeping their jobs. They asked the Vatican to live up to its own teachings.
That kind of courage, multiplied across enough people in enough places, is how systems change. Not through cynicism or resignation, but through believers—inside and outside institutions—refusing to let power structures contradict the values they exist to serve.